collective.sendaspdf 2.8

Introduction

collective.sendaspdf is an open source product for Plone that
allows downloading the page seen by the user as a PDF file. It also
provide a form to send the page by e-mail (a screenshot of the current
page in a PDF format being joined to the e-mail).

The site manager can easily chose which solution he prefers for
the generation.

Installing

To install the package, you can simply add ‘collective.sendaspdf’
to the eggs list in your buildout.
Then install it using Zope’s quick installer or Plone’s add-on
products manager.

To install xhtml2pdf, add the following to your buildout eggs
directory:

pisa
pyPdf
html5lib
reportlab

collective.sendaspdf has been tested with development versions of
pisa and html5lib. With the latest releases (when writing this
README - html5lib 0.9 and pisa 3.0.33) some pages could not be
rendered.

To install wkhtmltopdf, go to the projects page and download an
executable version for your OS. Install it so the command
‘wkhtmltopdf’ is in the PATH.
You can also update your buildout to automatically download
wkhtmltopdf and have it used by your instance using the following
recipes:

As you can see in this configuration, the zserver-threads number has
been pushed to 7. This avoids troubles with threads locks when
multiple PDFs are rendered at the same time.
7 threads work fine when rendering 5 PDFs of the same page at the same
time.

You might have some changes to do depending on the architecture you
are using (this example is for the amd64 architecture)

Configuring

Go to the Plone control panel. You will find a ‘Send as PDF’ link that
sends you to the products configuration page.

This page proposes a few settings:

the tool used to render the PDF files.

the directory where the PDF files are stored.

the sentence used as salt when hashing the user’s emails
(this hash is used to know which files a user can access)

the name used in the mail for the PDF file.

a default title/body for the mails.

a list of browser for which the attachment name should not be
given. Somehow, Chrome considers the PDF generated by the tool as
potentially harmful for the computer if the attachment name is
specified. Adding Chrome here avoids getting a warning.

For wkhtmltopdf user, two extra options are available:

always use the print CSS to render the PDF.

use the print CSS for a given set of objects.

xhtml2pdf always use the print CSS.

Compatibility

This product has been tested with Plone 3 and Plone 4.
After version 2.5 (well, starting at 2.6), we’ll only ensure
compatibility with Plone 4 (at least in the tests).

For developpers

You can find some extra doc in
collective/sendaspdf/tests.adapter.txt. It explains how to define
custom options in the request or with an adapter.

Testing

If you want to run the sendaspdf test suite, you need to add
‘pdfminer’ in the list of eggs in the buildout.

On Plone3, this is my configuration for running the tests (packages do
not seem to be mandatory as the eggs are taken from the zeoclient
section):

2.6 (2012-06-15)

2.5 (2012-03-29)

Added possibility to add an adapter that will generate default
options for PDF generation.
Adapter must implement ISendAsPDFOptionsMaker. [vincent]

Added layout options when generating files with wkhtmlaspdf. Options
available are: use book style, generate table of contents, margins.
Those options can be overriden in download links. [vincent]

Added utility to replace relative URL and include images as data in
the img tag. [vincent]

Enabled possibility to render table of contents and book style using
GET arguments. [vincent]

Added Italian translation [giacomos]

2.4.2 (2011-12-09)

Bugfix is JS bindings to download the PDF, it now uses the correct
context. [vincent]

Bugfix when the context title contains non-ascii characters. Zope
does not accept those characters in set_header [vincent+Vladislav]

2.4.1 (2011-12-07)

Bugfix in TinyMCE loading with Plone 4. [vincent]

Bugfix when checking if the attachment name should be providen,
‘self.excluded_browser_attachment’ does not seem to work on every
instances, used ‘self.getExcluded_browser_attachment()’
instead. [vincent]

Fixed test runners for Plone 4. [vincent]

2.4 (2011-11-22)

Added a setting in send as PDF tool so we can exclude some browser
when forcing file name. This will mainly usefull for Chrome, as this
one considers PDF generated with the tool as potentially harmful
files.
The same problem will certainly appear with Chromium. [vincent]

Display a file name based on the context’s title when downloading
the page. [Giacomo Spettoli]

Added some functional tests. [vincent]

Don’t repeat POST parameters anymore. [vincent]

2.3.1 (2011-06-27)

Bugfix with Unicode (again) and Ajax. [vincent]

2.3 (2011-05-25)

Bugfix when not using secure mail host. [Yuri]

Bugfix with wk transforms for encoding. [Khairil Yusof]

2.2 (2011-04-05)

2.1.1 (2010-12-23)

added a target (sic :/) attributes on the link to preview the PDF so
it opens in a new window. That’s prety ugly, but the fact is that if
a user clicks on the link with IE and Acrobat reader installed, it
will open the PDF in the same window. Hitting the ‘back’ button will
display the page without the Ajax form. [vincent]

in the Ajax popup, we do not try to initialize tinymce is an error
happenned. [vincent]

another IE bugfix due to an extra comma + CSS opacity fix [vincent]

2.1 (2010-12-15)

also added meta tag robots:noindex on the forms. [vincent]

Added header ‘X-Robots-Tag’: ‘noindex’ in downloaded file to avoid
having it indexed by search engines. [vincent]

Bugfix when sumbitting the Ajax form with TinyMCE. [vincent]

2.0.1 (2010-11-11)

Bugfix in jquery.sendaspdf.js - removed one comma that was causing
an error in IE. [vincent]

2.0 (2010-10-22)

compatibility fixes with Plone4. [vincent]

added Ajax version of “Download as PDF” link. [vincent]

added Ajax version of the “Send as PDF” link. [vincent]

Removed the ‘-C’ parameter. [yuri + vincent]

1.1 (2010-09-16)

when the PDF generation failed in the page to send by mail, we
display an error page instead of failing. [vincent]

bugfix in send page - it was impossible to load the Wysiwyg for
anonymous users. Stole some code from POI to solve it. [vincent]